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- Convenor:
-
Daniel Tower
(University of Sydney)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Advocacy and Activism
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The relationship between identity and territory is of particular significance during times of armed conflict. This panel focuses on interdisciplinary work between geography and anthropology to better frame research on conflict and aid distribution.
Long Abstract:
The relationship between identity and territory is of particular significance during times of armed conflict and in the brokering of peace and stability in its aftermath. Conceptions of a homeland and of sacred territory overlap with group identity based in ethnicity, religion, and culture. To this extent, geographical and anthropological research methods on armed conflict and subsequent post-conflict periods should be increasingly be considered in tandem. With advances in technology and the increased push for inter-disciplinary research this conference provides a platform for geographical methods to be incorporated into anthropological theory and vice versa.
This panel invites participants to approach aid and conflict from the standpoint that location is significant and connected to human social environments. Territory and identity reify national and ideological based systems that fuel conflict. Similarly, the role of aid organisations in conflict zones frequently need to circumnavigate these identities and connections to territory in order to function effectively. The role of this panel is starting a conversation on how interdisciplinary work between geography and anthropology can better frame research in armed conflict and associated aid networks that is often dependent on both perspectives.
Possible paper topics could include:
• Role of internal and external boundaries in national conflict
• Case studies of minority and indigenous attachment to territory in conflict
• The role of geography and anthropology in disputed territories
• Use of GIS in anthropology field work methods
• Visual anthropology methods in re-framing geographical concepts
• Geography of armed conflict from an anthropological framework
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The nearly mythological imagery of the Golan Heights has forged the becoming of young Syrian Druze women, and influenced their decision to marry across the border into Israel. The paper explores their life on the Golan Heights, their new self awareness from Druze returning home to Syrian migrants
Paper long abstract:
The main defence against assimilation and diaspora for ethno-religious communities is the strictest adherence to traditional teachings and kinship. This constantly fuels the search for brides and grooms within their communities, regardless of modern national borders.
The "Golan Brides" are Syrian Druze women who have married into the Druze community living on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. One of the most powerful motives for their life-changing choice is their vision of a highly idealised Golan, a land of plenty, blessed like heaven on Earth. Their passage to the Heights is the return, both ideal and physical, to the land that has belonged to their families for generations.
With songs ringing in their ears and old photos in front of their eyes, those brides made their way from Damascus to the checkpoint in El-Quneitra. Upon passing the UN-guarded gate they are stripped of their documents, and are de-facto forced to reinvent themselves, build families and make a living on the old land into a new society. With time, the myths have subsided and the once young Druze brides are now grown stateless Syrian women living on disputed territory dealing with diasporic issues, foreigner in their own homeland.
Drawing upon the theoretical work of Safran (1991), Clifford (1994) and the later work of Dufoix (2008), and upon ethnographic research into individuals' case studies of Golan brides, this article will explore ways of attachment to land as a maker of identity, and the paradox of women being migrant in their own historical geographic territory.
Paper short abstract:
Paramilitary groups in Central-Eastern Europe are not a new phenomenon, but the surge of independent paramilitaries that emerged the last decade is unprecedented. This paper investigates the relationship between their emergence, motivations and values of their members and their territorial identity.
Paper long abstract:
Paramilitary groups in Central-Eastern Europe are not a new phenomenon, but the surge of independent paramilitaries that emerged the last decade is unprecedented. This paper investigates the relationship between their emergence, motivations, worldviews and value trees of their members and how they are related to their territorial identity. It will focus on answering three main questions: 1. Why did these groups emerged? 2. Why and what types of people join them? 3. Is their identity fused with territoriality, and if it is, what came first, and is it a cause or a result of their membership?
Answers to these questions will be demonstrated on two case studies - two paramilitary groups, one coming from Slovakia, another from Ukraine. The useful difference comes from the fact that one has no war experience, while the other one has, which allows us to see how motivations, values and worldview can change, including internal dynamics of the group, when the reason for its existence - which ultimately is to increasing the competence in organized violence of its members - comes to existence. Methods used to obtain data include field research such as long-term embedded participant observation, text and audiovisual media production content analysis of groups and its members, and more quantitative tools such as psychological (Big Five mini-IPIP) and cognitive-neuroscientific questionnaires (MFQ + customized) distributed among members of the groups, combined with similar data obtained from general population for comparison of differences between the studied groups and general society.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research with Golan farmers this paper looks at conflicts over and through the Golan landscape between the Israeli state and the indigenous population. We argue that territorial and cultural rootedness, alongside statelessness emboldens political resistance to occupation.
Paper long abstract:
Can statelessness embolden political resistance? Exploring the political geography of resistance amongst stateless farmers in the Israeli-Occupied Syrian Golan Heights, this paper positions itself within the context of a more refined understanding of the politics of statelessness and citizenship, whilst recognizing the continued role and power of the State. We argue that despite Israel's material power over the control of resources and bodies in the Golan Heights it has been far less successful in exercising ideological control. This stems from the Occupied Syrians' combined condition as territorially and culturally rooted to the land alongside their stateless condition, which affords them an important vantage from which they negotiate their inclusion and exclusion from the states of both Syria and Israel. The empirical material draws from extended participant observation among Golani Syrians (in Syria and the Golan) as well as interviews with Golan farmers. We explain how and why specifically the Druze farmers of the Golan remained with their land after the Israeli occupation. We then demonstrate their significant resistance efforts, and their conflicts with Israel, over and through their claims to a legitimate presence in the material and ideational landscape. In doing so we challenge the common assumptions that stateless, Druze, and rural communities are particularly susceptible to State agendas.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how communication through the internet becomes a new power to support large-scale production of projecting one's ethnic affinity among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians. The disjuncture between their imaginary homeland and Syrian state divides their community.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how communication through internet and SNS (Social Network Service) promotes indirect communication among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians, and how it becomes a new power to support large-scale production of projecting one's ethnic affinity. The Diasporic condition of Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians since the late Ottoman period has never come to an end and even accelerated due to the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Their diasporic networks of faith have been constituting transcontinental communities of these Christians. The information disseminated via internet seems to bring dramatic reconfiguration of the world, in particular, their homelands in Syria and Iraq, where the old political structure has destroyed, and where processes for creating a new social order are undergoing. The idioms of their territory, security, and human rights become the emotional fuel for claiming more explicitly violent politics of identity. This situation creates divisions among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians, although they want to construct a unified community and identity. The war provides them not only with an imaginary homeland but also with an opportunity of participating in the movement of reclaiming it. Some support the idea of tracing their origin back to ancient Assyrians, and others claim their Aramean ethnic identity. One of the features of such ethnocultural movements is a battle of the imagination, in which the disjuncture between the Assyrian or Aramean nation and Syrian state becomes a seedbed of brutal separatisms.
Paper short abstract:
Maps and photographs exist as narratival devices that tell complex stories. This paper examines ethno-religious minorities during the conflict in Northern Iraq during the rise of ISIS, and how visual ethnography and GIS can be used together to understand the conflict more significantly.
Paper long abstract:
As a picture speaks a thousand words, maps and photographs exist as narratival devices that tell complex stories. In areas of armed conflict, they can provide information to the outside world of where and what is being fought over. In tandem, these two devices are important to understand from both anthropological and geographical perspectives. They form a feedback loop of information that records the loss in conflict from the interpersonal and social level, whilst recording the shifting cultural and territorial boundaries associated from the geographical. This paper will use maps created during my doctoral research from Northern Iraq during the ISIS conflict 2014-2018, to understand how ethno-religious minorities can incorporate ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries for national self-preservation. I will also use my visual ethnography research from the region, to show how photos capture delineations of cultural and religious identity, and how these identities can harden territorial boundaries during the conflict. When incorporated together, these two methodological approaches to understanding ethno-religious identity create a more holistic picture of the conflict, the peoples existing within, and their struggle to negotiate survival.